Advertising is very common in the computing environment. Primarily, the Internet includes many advertisers who use different mechanisms to advertise their products or services to the public. Because the number of advertisers continues to increase, advertisers continue to look for more creative ways to showcase their products or services.
In the computing environment, a user has a high probability of encountering an advertisement. The advertisement may take the form of an unsolicited email or may appear when a web page is accessed on the Internet. So, the chances are quite high that in a computing session, the user is likely to encounter a form of advertising. Because of the proliferation of advertisements, there is a tendency for the advertisement to go unnoticed by the user during the computing session. With this in mind, advertisers would like to find a creative way to get the user's attention for their advertisement without turning the user off from their computing activity and without invading the user's privacy.
Advertising may take various forms and advertisers have created various ways to promote their advertisements in the computing environment. For example, paid search advertising, contextual advertising, and display advertising are some of the types of advertising that may be encountered on the Internet.
Paid search advertising involves a keyword search and a search engine. When a user inputs a search term, the user may view the results containing a list of preferred web sites along with other web sites provided by the search engine. The preferred web sites usually relate to advertisers or publishers that have paid to have their web sites shown or placed in a prominent position when search results are returned to the user. In another context, some search engines may return the search results but list a set of advertisers off to the side of the web page with a set of links to web sites that are associated with the search term.
Contextual advertising involves showing the user that has accessed a web page advertising that is related to the web site or related to specific information in the web site. The idea here is to target specific advertising to the user based on what the user is viewing at the web site. Out of the view or without the knowledge of the user, computer software may scan information in the web page and provide advertisements based on the scanned text of the web page. This form of advertising may include providing a dynamic set of advertisements based on the web site provider's need or desire to provide as many types of advertisements in a limited-space environment in the web page.
Display advertising is another form of advertising that usually involves graphic information as opposed to textual information. The graphic information may include logos, photographs, and pictures to name a few. Display advertising may come in two forms, return on investment (ROI) advertising and brand advertising. Both types of advertising focus on branding, but brand advertising is especially important with advertisers as they try to develop ways to advertise to users in areas not associated with advertising. Brand advertising includes various ways to make users aware of products or services, and the advertiser's brand, to help increase sales of the products or services.
Brand advertisers contribute a large amount of revenue in the advertising business. However, it is difficult to target display brand advertising on some web sites because these web sites may host consumer-generated content (i.e. email, blog, community sites). The problem is that these web sites do not offer domain-specific content unlike some web sites that focus on a specific topic or area like MSN AUTOS and MSN MONEY websites provided by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
Because advertisers are eager to provide as much information to the public, especially in the Internet, advertisers are willing to pay to provide their advertisements in web pages, emails, or any other computing environment. In many cases, advertisers pay on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis. This basis may include “how many clicks occur on an advertisement shown in a web page” or “how many times users visited a particular web site from a link on a web page.” In any case, advertisers are looking for more creative ways to get their products or services to the user without the usual clicks on an advertisement or monitoring of traffic volume. Therefore, a solution is needed that would give advertisers a way to brand their products or services beyond the capabilities that exist today. The solution should include various forms of the computing environment such as the Internet, email, and computer applications. It should also include consumer-generated content.